The PNG icon should be named xnview.png and be 48x48 in size. The best icon would be the same that is compiled into the executable, i.e. the same as the favicon.ico from this website.

The xnview.desktop file can also be extended by specifying the MIME types that XnView can handle, but it's not strictly necessary.

These paths, /usr/share/applications and /usr/share/pixmaps, are unified for at least the major Linux distributions, i.e. RedHat, Fedora, Mandriva, SuSE, this means that a single RPM for all distributions is sufficient. The tarball release should also contain these files for people who want to manually copy them where they belong.

- HTML help.

It has been discussed before, I just want to mention it once again. I did a chmdump on the Windows CHM file successfully and got single HTML pages and images. chmdump is available here:

I know that JPEG 2000 generation is difficult, but rendering should not be. The Windows version uses JasPer for that. JasPer itself is highly portable and has very friendly, permissive licensing terms.

There are so few JPEG 2000 viewers out there for UN*X, it's sad. I know only /usr/bin/display from the ImageMagick package and a patched version of XV, but XV is hopelessly outdated and the patch is unofficial and ImageMagick is mainly a command-line tool and not a viewer for the desktop.

It would be so nice if XnView brought JPEG 2000 to UN*X, maybe it's possible to port the JPEG 2000 rendering support from Windows to UN*X.

XnView could expose to the desktop environment which file types it can handle. This can be done by installing a file named "XnView.xml" into "/usr/share/mime/packages" and running "/usr/bin/update-mime-database /usr/share/mime" afterwards from the RPM package.

This way, XnView will immediately appear in the context menu of file types that it can handle, very similar to what it does on Windows. This works for both KDE and GNOME. I can help with these things if you wish, writing the ".desktop" and ".xml" and ".spec" files and so on.

Another thing is that XnView seems to call the web browser in a strange way. If no web browser is opened and I open XnView from the shell and click "Visit XnView's Web Site", it says "netscape: command not found", but if either Mozilla or Firefox is already running, it opens a new window in the already running one, even if it is not Netscape.

And some very minor suggestions as well: The RPM can be localised, it's actually very easy, just put "Summary(fr)" and "Summary(de)" and "%description -l fr" and "%description -l de" under "Summary" and "%description" in the ".spec" file.

Another thing is that XnView does not seem to support UTF-8 locales. Is it possible to support UTF-8 locales, i.e. file names, with Motif? Most Linux distros are switching to UTF-8 these days, e.g. SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and maybe more.

OK, by reading the executable with the "strings" tool I found out that it is not true that "netscape" is hard-coded. XnView uses the $WEBBROWSER environment variable and defaults to Netscape only if $WEBBROWSER is not set.

But that reminds me of something else: Would't it be nice to have all these things documented? I couldn't find that documented anywhere, only by examining the executable directly. What do other people think about that? I can help writing such a document.